Blessed Be Providence Which Has Given To

When People Look Back At Their Childhood Or Youth, Their Wistfulness Comes From The Memory, Not Of What Their Lives Had Been In Those Years, But Of What Life Had Then Promised To Be. The Expectation Of Some Indefinable Splendor, Of The Unusual, The Exciting, The Great Is An Attribute Of Youth And The Process Of Aging Is The Process Of That Expectations' Gradual Extinction. One Does Not Have To Let It Happen. But That Fire Dies For Lack Of Fuel, Under The Gray Weight Of Disappointments.

Success Is An Ugly Thing. Men Are Deceived By Its False Resemblances To Merit.... They Confound The Brilliance Of The Firmament With The Star-shaped Footprints Of A Duck In The Mud.

To Live A Life Which Is A Perpetual Falsehood Is To Suffer Unknown Tortures.

There Is No Supernatural, There Is Only Nature. Nature Alone Exists And Contains All. All Is. There Is The Part Of Nature That We Perceive, And The Part Of Nature That We Do Not Perceive. ... If You Abandon These Facts, Beware; Charlatans Will Light Upon Them, Also The Imbecile. There Is No Mean: Science, Or Ignorance. If Science Does Not Want These Facts, Ignorance Will Take Them Up. You Have Refused To Enlarge Human Intelligence, You Augment Human Stupidity. When Laplace Withdraws Cagliostro Appears.

And If It Happened To Be A Christmas-night When The Great Bell Seemed To Rattle In Its Throat As It Called The Faithful To The Midnight Mass, There Was Such An Indescribable Air Of Life Spread Over The Sombre Facade That The Great Door-way Looked As If It Were Swallowing The Entire Crowd, And The Rose-window Staring At Them.